Where librarians and the internet meet: internet searching, Social Media tools, search engines and their development. These are my personal views.

February 15, 2014

Google results screwed. Again.

There's a really serious flaw in Google results at the moment, and I was alerted to this by a posting on Lifehacker. If you go along to Google.com (or .com.au and probably plenty of others) and do a search for Yahoo, you get told that there are approximately 926,000,000 results, which seems to make sense to me. Here's the screenshot:

However, if we now flick to the next page, there's apparently only 71 results:

Google promises to show you other similar results that it's culled from the results:

If you re-run the search you get 908,000,000 hits, which again is reasonable. I did try a few other terms, and they seemed to run ok, but it's worrying to say the least that Google can be this flakey. It's not a recent glitch either - the Lifehacker article indicated that this was at least 3 weeks old. Making errors is ok - we all do it. However, an error on this magnitude which doesn't get picked up for weeks is just really amateur.